Vendor Value: Rating the top tech companies

CIO Insight published its annual Vendor Value survey, with Red Hat coming out on top. A total of 472 respondents from companies ranging from $5 million to over $1 billion in revenues completed the survey in September 2007. More than half said they were the top IT executives at their company.

Vendors were rated on overall value, which include value (such as meeting company expectations for lowering business or IT costs) and reliability (such as meeting commitments to my company on time and budget). See the methodology here.

The survey included 38 vendors (strange to include Google, which only has a search appliance for enterprises, but not companies such as salesforce.com). It doesn't break out business units, such VMware from EMC.

In addition the survey looked at how the vendors were perceived by mid-market companies, scored by companies with less that $500 million and more than $500 million in revenue. HP topped that list for under $500 million, followed by Dell, and Verisign for the $500 or more class, followed by Research in Motion and McAfee. Not exactly and apples-to-apples comparison.

The survey also asked respondents the loyalty question--given a choice would they continue to do business with the vendor. As in the other findings, the differences between a scores such as 80 and 79 or 80 and 77 is not significant statistically.